RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The disk drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you add to the shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company provides are created on physical servers which employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will still be online because all the info will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be stored on standard hard disks which also function in RAID as we would like to make sure that any type of content you upload will be safe and sound all of the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.